DURING the Renaissance there was no such concept as melancholy, rather there were internal states veering from fear, despair, madness and even the “melancholia of love,” all thought of as disease.  

The title of Mary Ann Lund’s book suggests that this is the kind of  mind-body approach that we might agree with today but without the medieval concept of the four humours, chemical systems regulating human behaviour. Black bile was believed to be responsible for melancholia.

Lund, a scholar of Renaissance literature, guides us through Burton’s great work The Anatomy of Melancholy, dividing it into causes, symptoms and cures, the better to navigate what follows:  Sorrow and Fear, Body and Mind, The Supernatural, Delusions, Love and Sex, Despair, The Non-Naturals, Medicine and Surgery, Lifting the Spirits. There is a terrific section on music and mirth.
 
Lund presents The Anatomy as a work of the imagination, with poetic accounts of how people “have found cheer for themselves when struck with melancholia” as well as those who’ve had “cheer” imposed upon them.